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In this conversation, we chat with Henry Yoshida – Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Rocket Dollar. Prior to Rocket Dollar, Yoshida was the co-founder of Honest Dollar, a robo-advisor retirement platform that was acquired by Goldman Sachs, as well as a founder of MY Group LLC, a $2.5-billion assets under management investment firm. Henry shares his industry expertise as a speaker at several industry conferences, as well as having been featured or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Financial Times. Henry has a passion for helping people be the best that they can be and contributes as a member in several financial and technology industry organizations. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin and has an MBA from Cornell University.
More specifically, we touch on Henry’s career at BoA Merrill Lynch, his role at building a multi-billion dollar RIA business, how he started a digital retirement account platform called Honest Dollar which was sold to Goldman Sach’s neobank Marcus, the inception of Rocket Dollar, we talk IRAs and 401ks and how important these are for the current Gen-Z market, and so so much more!
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Sneak Peek:
Henry Yoshida:
…doing a tech startup was harder than all of that. And it was a completely new learning experience. I didn't have friends that were venture capitalists. Never raised money before, outside. I kind of loosely read that you do things like build a pitch deck and kind of refine your pitch and talk to venture investors. So, my co-founder and I, he was technical. I was the subject matter expert in sort of thinking about the product development side of it. We actually, this is maybe a cliche story, but we ended up meeting venture investors who were in town from Silicon Valley for SXSW here in Austin. And they ended up offering to be the lead of our seed round for $2 million. So that's kind of what got us up and running to be able to build the product. And we did that.
And again, new startup, we allocated the resources to building that product and probably bought too much into the, "If you build it, they will come." And weren't able to bifurcate the considerations towards revenue models and business plan. We had this idea of who we wanted to present to, but by the time the cash was running low, you're either looking at raising a new round of funding to develop that business. But in our case, the IP was built and great, and we didn't have enough of the beginnings of a flywheel on the partnership and business revenue generation model. So, we were fortunate to have…
More? So much more!
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